back to that dark place where your kind lodge. You could curse my name.
The three riflemen were standing around looking stupid, their rifles still trained on the place where he’d been standing the half second before. Creedmoor stood and shot them in quick succession.
He wasn’t sure how to disarm the device. In the end, he simply tore off the hammer and flicked it into the corner of the room. For good measure, he prized off the striking-plate. That seemed to work. He kicked what was left of the bomb under a bed.
A terrible crash sounded outside, off in the distance, like a resounding echo of Creedmoor’s own gunshots. Like now that he’d begun the killing, it was ricocheting madly out of his control: like it was all his fault once again.
CHAPTER 49
NEW DESIGN AT WAR
Dawn came. The sun rose in the west, behind thick dark clouds.. Lowry watched New Design’s walls, from which no surrender party emerged, over which no white flag was flown.
Subaltern Mill stood beside him. “Time’s up, sir.”
“Is it?”
“I think so, sir.”
“Huh.” The problem was that none of Lowry’s men’s timepieces worked right anymore. If they hadn’t been waterlogged in the rains or battered and cracked along the march, they’d stopped working for more mysterious reasons. Their hands spun meaninglessly, or hardly at all. Time out here was not yet ready to be measured. So Lowry waited, indecisively, for what felt like much longer than half an hour. He was waiting for orders. He was waiting for something to tick over and give him his signal. He waited, listening to the prisoner moan and pray, listening to his men mutter nervously, listening for sounds of surrender from New Design. And he was still waiting when there was a soft distant thump from behind the town’s walls, and a line of black smoke vented into the sky, and a shell came arcing up and then down again, falling well short of Lowry’s front lines, killing no one. A second shell followed instants later, and killed half a dozen.
The soldiers of New Design had brought up their cannon into a beet-field near the center of town. The deerlike things that had been corralled in the pen next door had been evicted. Some of the creatures stood around looking on, nervous and whinnying and incontinent. Others fled.
Liv watched the cannon move in from down the end of the street. She peered around the wall of that odd octagonal repository of books—the lock of which was broken, and now some of the deer-things hid in its shadows and grazed its shelves.
There were two cannon. Two long metal stalks, each rising from two heavy wheels that churned the mud of the beet-field. Different models—one was much smaller than the other, and put Liv in mind of a polio-shriveled limb. Their metal gleamed in the dawn light. They’d been well looked after.
A team of men dragged them with ropes. The ground was soft, and it took ten men apiece. Captain Morton led them. When it came time to set the charges, he pushed the younger men away and kneeled down in the muck to do the work himself.
They worked quickly and confidently, they were well drilled. They had the guns in place well before Lowry’s half hour was near up, even if one counted from the moment his rant began, and not from the moment the fuses fried and silence reclaimed the air. Or so Liv guessed—her own golden pocket watch was still worthless.
Morton stood looking out east across the beet-field. There was a dull glow in the distance. Not firelight; something cold and electric lit Lowry’s camp.
At no particular signal Liv could see, Morton knelt again by the base of the fatter, healthier cannon. A younger man applied himself to the undercarriage of the weaker cannon and mirrored Morton’s motions. Both men stood well back.
The cannons sounded.
Liv shielded her eyes from the flash. She had only a vague impression of thick black lines scored across the gunmetal sky. She went running, head down, and did not see the distant flicker where the shells struck, or the smoke rising.
Lowry’s retaliation came quick. Liv heard something whistling overhead, and didn’t look up. It flew with an incongruously bright and cheerful sound. She was well away down the street and through a muddy close between houses when she heard the sound of the device striking—a sound that reached her first as a dull despairing thud, as of a suicide’s body falling from a bridge, and